United States Economic Measures Against Cuba: Proceedings in the United Nations and International Law Issues

Two lawyers with a New York firm that has wide-ranging experience representing states trying to cope with the impact of U.S. sanctions have compiled this interesting compendium of documents on the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, recently further tightened by the provisions of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 . The fundamental issue of law and policy, as Princeton professor Richard Falk notes in an introduction to the volume, is "whether it is ever appropriate to use economic coercion on a unilateral basis as a way of destabilizing the governing process of another country." A primary purpose of the book, neither hidden nor stridently argued, is to document the absence of legal justification, in the opinion of the editors and a majority of U.N. members, for the U.S. policy of economic warfare against Cuba.